Articles Tagged ‘PA’

It’s official, from the end of November I’m going to be working for hibu as the UI Tech Lead for yell.com

I’ve had a great start to my career – over my 6 years at PA I’ve worked for the biggest employer in Europe (twice), the world’s biggest medical charity, oil giants, financial regulators, one-man-bands, governments, utility companies, major pharmas and worldwide hotel chains. I’ve gotta say, there’s no feeling like you’re making a difference in a company, and I’ve had some great results over the year;. I’ve even managed to carry 15 iPads in my hand luggage through Istanbul airport. With all of that comes trade-offs, and a pretty long commute, and it’s time to leave that behind.

Earlier this year, I was lucky enough to meet Josh Clark at FOWD. I’d been reading his articles about flagship apps and content first, and I was very keen to have a chat with him about a discussion I’d had with a client. I had been discussing which platform they should be targeting, and depending upon who I was talking to at the client (and their opinions on the goals of the project) the decision on a choice of platform was different.

Josh, and his mobile vs native talk, positioned this decision as an “audience/content/budget” question, which matched the conversations I’d been having with my client. At the end of his talk I said to Josh, “this would make a great flow-chart, like that one that Jessica Hische did!”, “Yeah, that’d be awesome!”, said Josh.

I’m very pleased to say, that after some delay, it’s ready for public consumption.

It’s still a simplification of the whole process but, in researching it, three things became abundantly clear:

You must know your audience – there are no exceptions to this. People use different phones for very different things. Blackberries are used by teenagers for BBM and by corporations because of it’s security and low data usage; iPhones are very high-end consumer devices; and Android phones are thought of as being for very technically minded people, but they’re also entry-level smart phones. Picking a platform without knowing what your content and its audience is a recipe for disaster.

Your content needs to be simple to access – all end-points on the flow-chart will need some form of content platform behind them to drive engagement, re-use and to keep the app up-to-date. If you’ve got an old CMS, you may have to build a light-weight web service to let your app access the content easily, quickly and efficiently. People use apps to get at content, and whether they’re a game or social media, your content is king.

You cannot do this half-heartedly – and by that I mean you’ve got to have a decent budget. Also at FOWD, Matt Gifford was joking that the £50 website was now a £75 website; apps are suffering this problem. Apps are viewed as small, simple bits of functionality that you can knock-up in a weekend; this is simply not true. Apps are often full-sized websites with the added complexity of fitting the core content onto a tiny screen, but since they look small clients think they’re easy to make and do, and are therefore cheap. Stories in the news of 14-year-olds making games in the app store top 10 aren’t helping either. Start with a 5-figure sum, and keep going upwards if you want your app to really succeed.

I also mention PhoneGap a lot in the flow-chart, and that’d because I genuinely believe it’s a great solution to the “discoverability” problem. This is where you have a mobile web site that isn’t getting enough exposure as people think of “apps” as items in the “app store”. PhoneGap fills this hole nicely, and gives you access to device hardware as a brilliant bonus. The tools are easy to use and PhoneGap Build now takes all of the hard bits of building for Blackberry and Windows Phone away.

Still, there are gray areas in the platform selection process, especially when it comes to tight budgets and enterprise apps. If there’s only one thing you take away from this tool it should be this: Content is King, know your audience and how they will use your app. The rest flows from there.

A really quick note: one of my colleagues Ed Hartwell-Goose has written a post for the Google App Engine blog on Project WOW – a site for weather enthusiasts to send their readings to and be collated by the Met Office. It’s well worth the read to see what we’ve been up to and some of the hugely high-performance stuff you can write for App Engine.